David Holland’s recent FOI has yielded more unbelievable assertions from the University that inspired the Monty Python sketch on idiocy. The FOI request was directed at untrue evidence given to Parliament by UEA Vice Chancellor Acton in connection with the notorious deletion of emails by Briffa, Jones and associates.
On June 10, a few days after the Gergis-Karoly-Neukom error had been identified, I speculated that they would try to re-submit the same results, glossing over the fact that they had changed the methodology from that described in the accepted article. My cynical prediction was that a community unoffended by Gleick or upside-down Mann would […]
Michael Kottek writes in the comment section: The results of my FOI request to the University of Melbourne can be seen here: http://tinyurl.com/96ey5dt I requested all correspondence between the authors and the journal regarding the paper. The referees reports were exempted as were documents relating to the resubmitted paper. I also requested correspondence between the […]
On Sep 27, the UEA carried out a wildcard search of the entire CRUBACK3 server for the Wahl Attachments, reporting on Sep 28 that the search had been unsuccessful. (See here for most recent previous status report). They refused to provide some requested crosschecking information e.g. whether the emails to which the Wahl Attachments were […]
On August 3, I discussed the progress of David Holland’s efforts to overcome obstruction by the University of East Anglia and the IPCC to a request under UK Freedom of Information legislation for a secret letter from Thomas Stocker to, among others, lead authors of IPCC AR4. I observed that many of the recipients of […]
The main target of Phil Jones’ notorious email deletion campaign was Eugene Wahl’s surreptitious correspondence with Briffa in summer 2006, in which Wahl changed the IPCC assessment of the Mann controversy from that which had been sent out for external review. Wahl’s changes were contained in attachments to his emails to Briffa. The emails mostly […]
On Feb 26, 2010, as part of their first response to Climategate, Thomas Stocker, a Climategate correspondent of Phil Jones and by then Co-Chair of AR5 WG1, sent a still secret letter to all AR4 Lead Authors, Coordinating Lead Authors and Review Editors under the letterhead of WG1, purporting, it seems, to represent the parent […]
The UK government has provided an incomplete response to Andrew Montford’s FOI request for copies of “correspondence or documentation” related to “the appointment of the [Oxburgh} panel or its deliberations”. However, even the incomplete information so far shows that UK government Chief Scientist John Beddington played a critical role. In addition, it contains the remarkable […]
I doubt that many inquiries are provided with documents in which the subject of the inquiry not only asks subordinates to delete documents subject to an FOI request, but also states in writing that he expects a subordinate to give an untrue statement to an official. And even rarer that an inquiry would not clarify […]
David Rose of the Mail places the Met Office obstruction of FOI requests squarely in the spotlight. The Met Office obstruction left a singularly bad taste with their sequence of untrue excuses for not producing John Mitchell’s Review Editor comments. First, they claimed that Mitchell had deleted all the emails concerning AR4. (This excuse came […]